Australian Senate Hansard for 23rd November 1995
QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Minister for Human Services and Health
The Labor lie exposed - Marks Royal Commission into suicide of Penny Easton
Gareth Evans: "I have not had an opportunity to check this morning with the Prime Minister as to whether any such conversation took place".
Senator VANSTONE--My question without notice is to the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Gareth Evans. Did the Prime Minister tell you and other senior ministers that Jim McGinty, the Western Australian Labor leader, had told him six months ago that Carmen Lawrence's version of events in the Easton affair was wrong and that former Western Australian ministers would be compelled to tell the truth about the matter if subpoenaed by the Marks royal commission, or was he so willing to hide from the truth that he wasn't even prepared to confide in his own cabinet colleagues? Isn't this just another demonstration of the fact that Carmen Lawrence has been damned and found guilty of lying on the evidence of her own colleagues, or do you believe it is Jim McGinty who is the liar?
Senator GARETH EVANS--I have not had an opportunity to check this morning with the Prime Minister as to whether any such conversation took place. But even if it did in the terms which are reported, that takes away nothing from the position that the Prime Minister and others of us in the government have adopted from the outset so far as this matter is concerned. I note that Mr McGinty is reported as having said that he told Mr Keating he was not doubting Carmen Lawrence's honesty; what he was doubting was her recollection. And that, of course, is what has been in issue from the outset. What we have had in this whole proceeding is an extraordinary exercise flawed in its conception and poisoned at source, given the nature of the enterprise on which the Western Australian government was embarked: an utterly unprecedented use and misuse of executive investigative power--not the power of the courts but the power of the executive arm of government, a process that was utterly flawed in its conduct, poisoned in its conduct, by the bizarre and often farcical way in which the proceedings unfolded under the chairmanship of the royal commissioner, and a proceeding which was manifestly flawed in the terms in which the findings were detailed and described.
We, under those circumstances, taking that view, as so many people have done who have looked objectively at this whole course of events, find absolutely no reason in any way, shape or form to resile from the position we have taken, which is to believe throughout in Carmen Lawrence's veracity, to believe that this was an issue about competing recollections and to acknowledge that recollections can differ. It is not a matter of weighing bags of wheat or chaff on one side of the scale versus another side and saying, `Because there are more recollections this way than there are the other way, therefore, there must be some compelling reason for accepting the majority view.' It is a matter of taking into account all the circumstances of the matter and making an objective judgment accordingly."
Other earlier statements by Gareth Evans, from Hansard, on the Marks Commission, Carmen Lawrence's bills and Penny Easton: